In recent years, there has been a tremendous proliferation of computers connected to a global network known as the Internet. A “client” computer connected to the Internet can download digital information from “server” computers connected to the Internet. Client application and operating system software executing on client computers typically accepts commands from a user and obtains data and services by sending requests to server applications running on server computers connected to the Internet. A number of protocols are used to exchange commands and data between computers connected to the Internet. The protocols include the File Transfer Protocol (FTP), the Hyper Text Transfer Protocol (HTTP), the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP), and other protocols.
The HTTP protocol is used to access data on the World Wide Web, often referred to as “the Web.” The World Wide Web is an information service on the Internet providing documents and links between documents. The World Wide Web is made up of numerous Web sites around the world that maintain and distribute Web documents (i.e. otherwise known as Web pages).
A Web site may use one or more Web server computers that are able to store and distribute documents in one of a number of formats including the Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML). An HTML document can contain text, graphics, audio clips, and video clips, as well as metadata or commands providing formatting information. HTML documents also include embedded “links” that reference other data or documents located on the local computer or network server computers.
A Web browser is a client application, software component, or operating system utility that communicates with server computers via FTP, HTTP, and Gopher protocols. Web browsers receive Web documents from the network and present them to a user. Internet Explorer, available from Microsoft Corporation, of Redmond, Wash., is an example of a popular Web browser. As long a Web document is in a computer readable format, such as HTML, a Web browser is able to display the Web document to a user, regardless of the language of the text contained in the Web document (e.g. English, French, Italian, German, Spanish, Japanese, etc.). Although the Web browser is able to display the text of the Web document, the text is frequently in a language that is foreign to, and thus unreadable by, the user. This is a significant limitation of the Web.
In the past, Web document and Web site developers have attempted to solve this problem by manually translating each Web document into separate languages. More particularly, developers would create a separate Web page with its own uniform resource locator (URL) for each desired language. Under this approach, each translated Web page is transmitted separately. Thus, this approach requires large volumes of data and increases network transmission. In addition, this approach is very time consuming, costly and inefficient.
Accordingly, it is an object of the present invention to provide a method of allowing users to immediately translate electronic files, such as Web documents, into the language of their choice.